> On Nov 28, 2019, at 3:46 AM, David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I'm sorry to say but one of the main reasons we have linux-next for is > to find BUGs early, before they go upstream. It is a way of giving > patches *more* testing. Yes, you are doing to dirty work (which is > highly appreciated btw) by debugging all that crap, and I can understand > how that can be frustrating. It is already an expensive development practice if developers need to rely on someone else to figure out their own bugs in linux-next. linux-next is for integration testing, but majority of those regressions I had to deal with nowadays have nothing to do with integration, i.e., interaction with other subsystems. > > But believe me, the world won't end if your on vacation for a couple of > weeks, even though some BUGs could sneak in ... e.g., lately I try to > review as much as I can on the MM list (and Michal is steadily watching > out as well). Sure, the world will still be running, but good luck on solely rely on reviewing with bare eyes before merging. > > The solution to your problem is more review and testing, really. E.g., > I'd be very happy if other developers would test their patches more > thoroughly and if there would be more review activity on the MM list in > general (my patches barely get any review ... and I sent a lot of fixes > lately). Of course, that helps but it is a culture that very difficult to change now. How many times I saw even high-profile developers proudly sent out patches labeled “no testing” explicitly and implicitly ? > > As soon as we stop touching our code because we are afraid of BUGs, we > lost the battle against an unmaintainable code base. Your generalizations of things make me sorrow. > > BTW: [1] mentions "unbalanced software development culture with regard > to quality vs quantity that supplies an endless stream of bugs". I don't > agree to this statement. There will *always* be an endless stream of > BUGs - and most of them come from new features and performance > improvements IMHO. To me, cleanups and refactorings are important tools > to improve the software quality (and reduce the code size). All we can > do is try to minimize the number of BUGs - e.g., via more code review, > manual testing, automatic testing, and by actually understanding the > code. Cleanups/refactorings can even fix undiscovered BUGs (e.g., latest > example is [2]) Surely, most of people probably don’t care about those endless bugs because Linux is a monopoly in data center and open source and it is always like this since Linux was born as a hobby project.
